Transcript of Elon Musk: 3 Years of X, OpenAI Lawsuit, Bill Gates, Grokipedia The Future of Everything

Let's get started. We wanted to try something new this week. Every week, I get a little upset. Things perturb me, Sacks. And when it does, I just yell and scream, Disgratia. And so I bought the domain named discracead. Com for no reason other than my own amusement. But you know what? I'm not alone in my absolute disgust at what's going on in the world. So this week, we're going to bring out a new feature here on the All In podcast, Disgraciad corner.

Disgraciad. He was the best guy around.

What about the people he murdered? What murder?

You can act like a man. What the hell would do? He's just killed a little bit. In mannage. In I salted them a little bit. I'm smacked, and I want the spit. What's your name? Your hair was in the toilet water. Disgusting. I had to supplicate you, you little dick.

It's a fucking disgrace. Disgraciad. Disgraciad.

This is fantastic.

This is our new feature. Chamath, you look like you're ready to go. Why don't you tell everybody who gets your Disgratia on this one?

Wait, we all had to come with a Disgraciad?

I really. You missed a memo. All right, fine. Enough. I got one. Okay, all right, just calm down.

My Disgratia corner goes to Jason Calcandis.

Here we go.

Come on, man, you can't.

And Pete Buttijage, where they, in the first 30 seconds seconds of the interview, compared virtue signaling points about how each one worked at various moments at Amnesty International. Absolutely. We did. Literally affecting zero change, making no progress in the world, but collecting a badge that they used to hold over other people. Disgratia.

We wrote a lot of letters. We wrote a lot of letters.

Disgratia.

Which is good. That means it's a good one because it's behind the scenes. Disgratia.

Jason Calcanis and Pete Buttijage. Disgratia.

Great. I'm glad that I got the first one. You can imagine what's coming next week for I saw the Sydney Sweeney dress today trending on social. Disgratia. It's too much. What? It's too much.

What is it? I don't even know what this is. You didn't see it?

nick, pull up a picture, okay?

Bring it up. It's a little floppy.

.

How is this discrace odd?

What are you talking about? The dress is too much. It's disgraceful. A little bit... Look at this. Oh, my God. Too much. It's elegant. In my day, Sacks, a little cleavage, maybe, perhaps in the '90s or 2000s, some side view. This is too much.

Hey, guy. Great high-brow subject, madam.

We were discussing the role of politics, and then Sydney, Sweden, dressed. I don't know what's trending on X. Hi, dad. Hi, dad.

Put away the phone, Jason.

Let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sides.

And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you guys. What's going on with the algorithm? I'm getting Sydney Sweeney's dress all day, and last week, Sacks- Well, maybe you should stop favoring it.

I got to favor it 15 times.

And then Sacks, poor Sacks, got invited to Slutcon for two weeks straight on the algorithm.

I say the algorithm has become... If If you demonstrate...

You can't even tell if that's a joke or a real thing.

It's a real thing in San Francisco. It's all too real.

It's actually both real. Wait, what? Conners are in.

For real? Yeah. If you demonstrate interest in anything on X now, if you click on it, God forbid, you like something, man, the algorithm is on it. It will give you more of that. It will give you a lot more.

Yes. We did have an issue. We still have somewhat of an issue where there was an important bug that was figured out, that was solved over the weekend, which caused in-network posts to be not shown. Basically, if you followed someone, you wouldn't see their posts. Got it. You wouldn't see the big bug, a major bug. Then the The algorithm was not probably taking into account if you just dwelled on something. But if you interacted with it, it would go hog wild. As David said, if you would have a favorite, reply, or engage with it in some way, it is going to give you a torrent of that same thing.

Oh, Zacks. So maybe you-Zacks, what was your interaction? Did you bookmark Schluck on? I think you bookmarked it.

Here's what I thought was good about it, though, is all of a sudden, I would see- If you haven't just put Sydney Sweeney's boobs, then you're getting a lot more of it. Yeah. Then you would say, Okay, But what I thought was good about it was that you would see who else had a take on the same subject matter. And that actually has been a useful part of it. So you get more of a 360 view on whatever it is that you're shown interested.

Yeah. It was giving you... It was just going too far, obviously. It was over-correcting. It had too much gain on... It just turned up the gain way too high on any interaction. You would then get a tarn to that. It's like, Oh, you had a taste of it? We're going to give you three helpings. We're going to give you the food funnel.

And that's all being done. I assume it's all being done with Grok now, so it's not like the old hard-coded algorithm, or is it using Grok?

Well, what's happening is we're gradually deleting the legacy Twitter heuristics. Now, the problem is that as you delete these heuristics, it turns out the one heuristic, the one bug was covering for the other bug. So when you delete one side of the bug, it's like that meme with the internet where there's this very complicated machine and there's a tiny little wooden stick that's keep it going, which was, I guess, AWS East or whatever, had something like that. When somebody pulled out the little stick, what's this stick thing?

I think it would be good if it- Half of Earth. It would be great if it showed one person you follow, and then it blended the old style, which was just reverse chronological of your friends, the original version, with this new version. So you get a little bit of both.

Well, you still have the plot. Everyone still has the following tab. Now, something we're going to be adding is the ability to have a curated following tab, because the problem is, if you follow some people and they're maybe a little more prolific than you're... Scalble. You follow someone and some people are much more... Say a lot more than others. That makes the following tab hard to use. So we're going to We've had an option where you can have the following tab be curated. So Rock will say, What are the most interesting things posted by your friends? And we'll show you that in the following tab. It will also be the option of listening everything everything. But I think having that option will make the following tab much more useful. So it'll be a curated list of people you follow, like ideally, the most interesting stuff that they've said, which is what you want to to look at. And then we've mostly fixed the bug, which would give you way too much of something if you interacted with a particular subject matter. And then the really big change Exchange, which is where Grok literally reads everything that's posted to the platform.

Actually, there's about 100 million posts per day. So it's 100 million pieces of content per day. I think that's actually maybe just in English. I think it goes beyond that if it's outside of English. We're going to start off reading what Grok thinks are the top 10 million of the 100 million, and it will actually read them and understand them and categorize them and match them to users. It's like this is not a job humans could ever do. And then once If not as scaling as it used to be, well, we'll add the entire 100 million a day. So it's literally going to read through 100 million things and show you the things that it thinks out of 100 million posts per day, what are the most interesting posts to you.

How much of Colossus will that take? A lot of work. Yeah, that's like, is it tens of thousands of servers to do that every day?

Yeah, my guess is it's probably on the order of 50K, H100, something like that.

And that will replace search. So you'll be able to actually search on Twitter and find things with a plain language.

We'll have semantic search where you can just ask a question and it will show you all content, whether that is text, pictures or video that matches your search query, semantically.

How has it been? Three years in. It was a three-year anniversary, like a couple of days.

This is three years?

Yeah. Remember what was Halloween?

Yeah, Halloween's back.

Halloween's back, but it was the weekend you took over was Halloween. We had a good time.

Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, three years.

We will think it's three years from now.

Yeah. What's the takeaway? Three years later, you obviously don't regret buying it. It saved free speech. That was good. It seemed to have turned that holding around. That was, I think, a big part of your mission. But then you added it to XAI, which makes it incredibly valuable as a data source. When you look back on it, the reason you bought it, to stop crazy woke mind virus and make truth exist in the world again. Great. Mission accomplished. And now it has this great future.

Yeah, we're going to go to Community Notes. You can also ask Grok about anything you see on the platform. If you just press the Grok icon on any X post and it will analyze it for you and research it as much as you want. So you can basically have, just by tapping the Grok icon, you can assess whether that post is the truth, the whole truth or nothing but the truth, or whether there's something supplemental you need to be explained. I think we made a lot of progress towards freedom of speech and people We're being able to tell whether something is false or not false. Propagand. The recent update to Grok is actually, I think, very good at piercing through propaganda. We use that latest version of Grok to create Grok Wikipedia, which I think is much more... It's not just, I think, more neutral and more accurate than Wikipedia, but it actually has a lot more information than a Wikipedia page.

Did How did you seed it with Wikipedia? Actually, take a step back. How did you do this?

Well, we used AI.

But meaning totally unsupervised, just a complete training run on its own, totally synthetic data, no seeded set, nothing?

Well, it was only just recently possible for us to do this. We finished training on a maximum a version of Grok that is good at cogent analysis. So breaking down any given argument into its axiomatic elements, assessing whether those axioms are... The basic test for coagulency, the axioms are likely to be true, they're not contradictory, that the conclusion most likely follows from those axioms. We just trained Grok on a lot of critical thinking. It just got really good at critical thinking, which was quite hard. Then we took that version of Grok and said, Okay, cycle through the million most popular articles in Wikipedia and add, modify, and delete. That means research the rest of the internet, whatever's publicly available, and correct the Wikipedia article, some fixed mistakes, but also add a lot more context. Sometimes, really, the nature of the propaganda is that facts are stated that are technically true but do not properly represent a picture of the individual or event.

This is critical because when you have a bio, as you do, actually, we all do, on Wikipedia, Over time, it's just the people you fired or you beat in business or have an ax to grind. So it just slowly becomes the place where everybody who hates you then puts their information. I looked at mine, It was so much more representative, and it was five times longer, six times longer. And what it gave way to was much more accurate, much more accurate. And this opportunity was sitting here, I think, for a long time. It's just great that you got to it because they don't update my page, but I don't know, twice a month. And then who is the secret cobble? There's 50 people who are anonymous who decide what gets put on it. It was a much better much more updated page in version 1.

Yes, this is version 2. 1, as we put it, as we show at the top. I do think, actually, by the time we get to version 1, 1. 0, it'll be 10 times better. But even at this early stage, as you As you just mentioned, it's not just that it's correcting errors, but it is creating a more accurate, realistic, and fleshed-out description of people and events and subject matters. You can look at articles on physics in Grokipeda. They're much better than Wikipedia by far.

This is what I was going to ask you. Do you think that you can take this corpus of pages now and get Google to deboost Wikipedia or boost Grokipedia in traditional search? Because a lot of people still find this and they believe that it's authoritative because it comes up number one. How do you do that? How do you flip Google?

If people share a lot of... If Grokopedia is used elsewhere, if people cite it on their websites or post about it on social media, or when they do a search, when Grokopedia shows up, they click on Grokopedia, it will naturally rise in Google's rankings. I did text Sundar because even a day after launch, if you tapped in Grokopedia, Google would just say, Did you mean, Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, yeah.

It wouldn't even bring Grochopedia up at all.

Yeah, that's true.

How's the usage then? Have you seen good growth since it launched?

Yeah. Is it very early? It went super viral. We're seeing it started all over the place. I think we'll see it used more and more as people refer to it. People will judge for themselves. When you read a Wikipedia article about a subject or a person that you know a lot about, and you see, Wow, this is way better than Wikipedia. It's more comprehensive, it's way more accurate. It's neutral instead of biased. Then you're going to forward those links around and say that this is actually the better source. Wikipedia will succeed, I think, very well because it is fundamentally a superior product to Wikipedia. It is a better source of information. And we haven't even added images and video yet. That's going to be awesome. Yeah, we're going to add a lot of video. So using Grokimagine to create videos. If you're trying to explain something, Grokimagine take the text from Wikipedia and then generate a video, an explanatory video. If you're trying to understand anything from how to tie a bow tie to how do certain chemical reactions work, or really anything, dietary things, medical things, we could You can just go and see the video of how it works.

That is created by E.

When you have this version that's maximally truth-seeking as a model, do you think that there needs to be a better eval or a benchmark that people can point to that shows how off of the truth things are? So that if you're going to start a training run with Common Crawl, or if you're going to use Reddit, or if you're going to use... Is it important to be able to say, Hey, hold on a second. This eval just... You guys suck on this eval. It's just this crappy data.

Yeah, I guess I'm not sure. I think there are a lot of evals out there. I have complete confidence that Wikipedia is going to succeed because Wikipedia is actually not a very good product. The information is sparse, wrong, and out of date. And it doesn't have the Very few images. There's basically no video. So if you have something which is accurate, comprehensive, has videos, where moreover, you can ask if there's any part of it that you're curious about, you can just highlight it and ask Rock right there. If you're trying to learn something, it's just great. It's not going to be a little bit better than Wikipedia. It's going to be a hundred times better than Wikipedia.

Elon, do you think you'll see good uniform usage? If you look back on the last three years since you bought Twitter, there was a lot of people after you bought Twitter that said, I'm leaving Twitter. Elon's bought it. I'm going to go to this other wherever the hell they went. There's all these articles saying- Blue sky is falling.

Blue sky is falling is my favorite.

I guess my question is, as you destroy the woke mind viral control of the system, and as you bring truth to the system, whether the system is through Grockipedia or through X, do people just look for confirmation bias and they actually don't accept the truth? Or do you think people are actually going to see the truth and change? They can't handle it. But I mean, is that like- You thought Sydney Sweenish groups were great.

Where did you see mine?

Looking good. Yeah, solid week up there.

A little share. I think we just got flagged on YouTube.

Yeah, that was definitely going to give us a censorship moment. Tg 13.

Great day in moves.

No, but do people change their mind?

I could take it. There's no such thing as Grade A move.

It's off the rails already. David, you were trying to ask a serious question.

Go Well, I just want to know if people change their mind. Can you actually change people's minds by putting the truth in front of them? Or do people just take... They ignore the truth because they feel like they're in some camp and they're like, I'm on this side.

They want the confirmation bias.

They want the confirmation bias, and they want to stay in a camp, and they want to be tribal about everything.

It is remarkable how much people believe things simply because it is the belief of their in-group, whatever their political or ideological is. There's some pretty hilarious videos of there was some guy going around, is a racist Nazi or whatever. And he was trying to show them the videos of the thing that they are talking about, where he is, in fact, condemning the Nazis in the strongest possible terms and condemning racism in the strongest possible terms. And they literally don't even want to watch the videos. So, yeah, people, or at least some people, they were preferred... They will stick to whatever their ideological views are, whatever their political, tribal views are, no matter what, the evidence could be staring them in the face, and they're just going to be a flat earther. There is no evidence that you could show a flat earther to convince them the wills around because everything is just Why the World is flat.

I think the ability to hit @grok in a reply and ask it a question in the thread has really become like a truth-seeking missile on the platform. So when I put up metrics or something like that, I reply to myself and I say, at Grok, is the information I just shared correct? And can you find any better information? And please tell me if my argument is correct or if I'm wrong. And then it goes through and then it DMs Sacks, and then Sacks gets in my replies and tries to No, but it does actually a really good job. And that combined with community notes, now you've got two swings at bat. The community's consensus view and then Grok coming in. I think it would be really interesting if groch on really powerful threads did its own version of community notes and had it sitting there ahead of time. You could look at the thread and it just had next to it. Or maybe on the specific statistic, you could click on it and it would show you, Here's where that statistic's I mean, you can talk.

I mean, essentially every post on X, unless it's advertising or something, has the Groch symbol on it. And you just tap that symbol and you're one tap away from a Groch analysis, literally just one tap. We don't I don't want to clutter the interface with providing an explanation, but I'm just saying if you go on X right now, it's one tap to get Grok's analysis, and Grok will research the X post and give you an accurate answer. You can even ask us to do further research and further due diligence, and you can go as far down the rabbit as you want to go. But I do think this is consistent with we want X to be the best source of truth on the planet by far, and I think it is, and where you hear any and all points of view, but where those points of view are corrected by human editors with community notes. The essence of community notes is But people who historically disagree, agree that this community note was correct. And all of the community notes code is open source and the data is open source. So you can How do you create any community note from scratch independently.

By and large, it's worked very well.

Yeah.

I think we originally had the idea to have you back on the pod because it was a three-year anniversary of the Twitter acquisition. Okay. I just wanted to reminisce a little bit. Sure. I remember- Where's that sink? Where's that sink? Well, yeah. So Elon was staying at my house. We had talked the week before, and he told me the deal was going to close. And so I was like, Hey, do you need a place to stay? And he took me up on it. And the day before he went to the Twitter office, there was a request made to my staff, Do you happen to have an extra sink? And they did not, but they were able to- Who has an extra sink, really? But they were able to locate one at a nearby hardware store, and I think they paid extra to get it out of the window or something.

Well, I think the store was confused because my security team was asking for any sink. Normally, people wouldn't ask for any sink. You need a sink that fits in your bathroom or connects to a certain plumbing. So they're trying to ask, he's like, Well, what faucets do you want? No, I just wanted a sink.

Yeah, they think it's a mental person The store was confused that we just wanted a sink and didn't care what the sink connected to.

That was earlier. They were almost not letting us buy the sink because they thought maybe we'd buy the wrong sink. It's just rare that somebody wants a sink for a specific sake.

For meme purposes.

One of my favorite memories was Elon said, Hey, swing by, check it out. I said, Okay, I come by and I drive up there and I'm looking where to park the car and I realize there's just parking spaces around the entire building. I'm like, Okay, this can't be legal parking, but I park and it's legal parking.

You're in downtown SF, so you might get your window broken.

Yeah, I might not be there when I get back. But we get in there and the place is empty. It was seriously empty, except for the cafeteria.

There was an entire... The Twitter headquarters was two buildings. One of the One of the buildings was completely and utterly empty, and the other building had 5% occupancy.

The 5% occupancy, we go to the cafeteria, we all go get something to eat, and we realized there's more people working in the cafeteria than at Twitter.

There were more people making the food than eating the food. Great. And this giant really nice cafeteria. This is where we discovered that the actual of the lunch was $400. The original price was $20, but it was at 5% occupancy, so it was 20 times higher. And they still kept making the same amount, pretty much, and charging the same amount. So effectively, lunch was $400. That was a great meeting. Yes. And then there was where we had the initial meetings, trying to figure out what the heck is going on meetings in the in the... Because there's the two buildings, the two Twitter buildings, and the one with literally no one in it. That's where we had the initial meetings. And then we tried drawing on the white the whiteboard and the markers had gone dry. Nobody had used the whiteboard markers in two years. So sad. None of the markers were. So we were like, This is totally bizarre. But it was totally clean because the cleaning crew had come in and done their job and cleaned an already clean place for, I don't know, two, three years straight.

It was fineless.

Then I mean, honestly, this is more crazy than any Mike Judge movie or Silicon Valley or anything like that. I remember going into the men's bathroom, and there's a table With, you know.

Hygiene?

Menstrual hygiene products. Yeah. Refreshed every week. Tampons, like a fresh box of tampons. And we're like, But there's literally no one in this building. But no, it hadn't turned off the send fresh tampons to the van's bathroom in the empty building had not been turned off. No. So every week, they would put a fresh box of tampons in an empty building for years. This happened for years. It must have been very confusing to the people that were being asked to do this because they're like, Okay, I'll throw them away.

I remember when you...

I guess they're paying us. So we'll just put tampon. So you have to consider the string of possibilities necessary in order for anyone to possibly use that tampon in the men's bathroom at the unoccupied second building of Twitter headquarters. Because you'd have to be a burglar who is a trans man, burglar, who's unwilling to use the woman's bathroom that also has tampons. Statistically, there's no one in the building. You're broken into the building. At that moment, you have a period. Yes, and you're on your period. I mean, you're more likely to be struck by a meteor than need that tampon, okay?

Well, I remember.

I think it was shortly after that, you discovered an entire room at the office that was filled with Stay Woke T-shirts. Do you remember this? An entire pile of merch. Yes. The hashtag Stay Woke.

Stay Woke.

And also a big buttons, like those magnetic buttons that you put on your shirt that said, I am an engineer. I'm like, Look, if you're an engineer, you don't need a button. Who's the button for?

Who are you telling that to?

You could just ship code.

We would know.

We could check your.

But they're like scarves, hoodies, all kinds of merch that said #StayWork.

Yeah, a couple of music.

When you found that, I was like, My God, man, the barbarians are fully within the gates now.

The barbarians have smashed through the gates and are looting the merch.

Yes. You are rummaging through their holy relics and defiling them.

When you think about it, David, the amount of waste that we saw there during those first 30 days, just to be serious about it for a second, this was a publicly traded company. So if you think about the financial duty of those individuals, there was a list of SaaS software we went through, and none of it was being used. Some of had never been installed, and they had been paying for it for two years. They've been paying for a SaaS product for two years. And the one that blew my mind the most that we canceled was they were paying a certain amount of money per desk to have desk-sweeting software in an office where nobody came to work. So they were paying to wrap nobody.

There was millions of dollars being paid for, yes, but for analysis of pedestrian software that used cameras to analyze the pedestrian traffic to figure out where you can alleviate pedestrian traffic jams in an empty building.

Right.

That's like 11 out of 10 on a Dilbert scale.

Yeah, it was pretty, shout out Scott Adams.

You've gone off scale on your Dilbert level at that point.

Let's talk about the free speech aspect for a second, because I think that is the most important legacy of the Twitter acquisition. I think people have short memories, and they forget how bad things were three years ago. First of all, you had figures as diverse as President Trump, Jordan Peterson, Jay Bata Chariya, Andrew Tate. They were all banned from Twitter. And I remember when you opened up the Twitter jails and reinstated Their accounts, freed all the bad boys of free speech.

That was the best deal.

Yes. So you basically gave all the bad boys of free speech their accounts back. But second, beyond just the bannings, there was the shadow bannings. And Twitter had claimed for years that they were not shadow banning. This was a paranoid, conservative, conspiracy theories.

There was a very aggressive shadow banning by what was called the Trust and Safety Group, which, of course, naturally would be The one that is doing the nefarious shadow banning. I just think we shouldn't have a group called Trust and Safety. This is an Orwellian name if there ever was one. I I'm from the Trust Department. Oh, really?

I want to talk to you after your tweets.

Can we see your DM? Say that you're from the Trust Department. That's the Ministry of Truth right there. Twitter executives had maintained for years that they were not engaged in this practice, including under oath.

And on the heels of you opening that up and exposing that, because by the way, it wasn't just the fact they were doing it, they created an elaborate set of tools to do this. They had checkboxes in the app.

Elarbort set of tools to... Yes, to deboost accounts, yes.

Yes. And subsequently, we found out that other social networking properties have done this as well, but you were really the first to expose it.

This is still being done at the other social media companies. It's in Google, by the way. I don't know if you're picking on Google because they're all doing it. But for search results, if you simply push a result pretty far down the page or the second page of results. The joke used to be, or still is, I think, what's the best place to hide a dead body? The second page of Google search results, because nobody ever goes to the second page of Google search results. So you could hide a dead body there, and nobody would find it. And then it's not like you haven't made them go away. You've just put them on this one page, too.

Yes. So shadow banning, I think, was number two. So first was banning, second was shadow I think third to me was government collusion, government interference. You released the Twitter files. Nothing like that had ever been done before where you actually let investigative reporters go through Twitter's emails, check groups.

I was not looking over their shoulder at all. They just had direct access to everything.

And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter Trust and Safety Group, where it turns out the FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests, and they were very involved in the banning, the shadow banning, the censorship, which I don't think we ever had definitive evidence of that before. That was pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, and the US House of Representatives had hearings on the matter, and a lot of this was unearthed. It's a public record. So a lot of people, some of them still think this was made up. I'm like, this is just literally the Twitter files are literally the files at Twitter. We're literally just talking about the emails that were sent internally that confirm this. This is what's on the Slack channels, and this is what is shown on the Twitter database as where people have made either suspensions or shadow bans.

Has the government come and asked you to take stuff down since, or they just have to... The policy is, Hey, listen, you got to file a warrant, you got to come correct, as opposed to just putting pressure on executives?

Yeah, our policy at this point is to follow the law. Now, the laws are obviously different in different countries. So it's not as I get criticized for like, Why don't I push free speech in XYZ country that doesn't have free speech laws? I'm like, Because that's not the law there. If we don't obey the law, we'll simply be blocked in that country. The policy is really just adhered to the laws in any given country. It is up to us to agree or disagree with those laws. If the people of that country want laws to be different, then they should ask their leaders to change the laws. But As soon as you start going beyond the law, now you're putting your thumb on the scale. I think that's the right policy, is just adhere to the laws within any given country. Now, sometimes we get in a bit of a bind, like we had got into with Brazil, where this judge in Brazil was asking us or telling us to break the law in Brazil and ban accounts contrary to the law of Brazil. Now we're somewhat stuck. We're like, Wait a second. We're reading the law and it says this is not allowed to happen, and also giving us a gag order.

We're not allowed to say it's happening, and we have to break the law. And the judge is telling us to break the law. The law is breaking the law. That's where things get very difficult. And we were actually banned in Brazil for a while because of that.

I just want to make one final point on the free speech issue, and then we can move on. I think people forget that the censorship wasn't just about COVID. There was a growing number of categories of thought and opinion that were being outlawed. The, quote, content moderation, which is another Orwellian euphemism for was being applied to categories like gender and even climate change. The definition of hate speech was constantly growing. Yes. And more and more people were being banned or shadow banned. And there was more and more things that you couldn't say. This trend of censorship was growing, it was galloping, and it would have continued. If it wasn't, I think, for the fact that you decided to buy Twitter and opened it up, and it was only on the heels of that, that the other social networks were willing to, I think, be a little bit chasened in their policies and start to push back more.

Yeah, that's right. Once Twitter broke ranks, it became very obvious what the others were doing. And so they had to mitigate their censorship substantially because of what Twitter did. Perhaps to give them some credit, they also felt that they had the air cover to be more inclined towards free speech. They still do a lot of shadow and whatnot at the other social media companies, but it's much less than it used to be.

Elon, what have you seen in terms of governments creating new laws? We've seen a lot of this crackdown in the UK on what It's being called hateful speech on social media and folks getting arrested and actually going to prison over it. It seems like when there's more freedom, the side that is threatened by that comes out and creates their own counter. There's a reaction to that, and there seems to be a reaction. Are you seeing more of these laws around the world in response to your opening up free speech through Twitter and those changes and what they're enabling that the governments and the parties that control those governments aren't aligned and they're stepping in and saying, Let's create new ways of maintaining our control through law?

Yeah, there's been an overall global movement to suppress free speech in in the guise of suppressing hate speech. But then the problem with that is that your freedom of speech only matters if people are allowed to say things that you don't like or even that's things that you hate. Because if you're allowed to suppress speech that you don't like, then you don't have freedom of speech. It's only a matter of time before things switch around and then the shoes on the other foot and they will suppress you. Suppress not, lest you be suppressed. But there is a movement. There was a very strong movement to codify speech suppression into the law throughout the world, and including the Western world, Europe and Australia.

Uk and Germany were very aggressive in this regard.

Yes. My understanding is that in the UK, there's something like 2,000 or 3,000 people in prison for social media posts. In fact, there's so many people that were in prison for social media posts. Many of these things are You can't believe that someone would actually be put in prison for this. They have, in a lot of cases, released people who have committed violent crimes in order to imprison people who have simply made posts on social media, which is deeply wrong. And that underscores why the founders of this country made the First Amendment. The First Amendment was freedom of speech. Why did they do that? It's because in the places that they came from, there wasn't freedom of speech, and you could be imprisoned or killed for saying things.

Can I ask you a question just to maybe move to a different topic? If you came and did this next week, we will be past the Tesla board vote. We talked about it last week, and we talked about how crazy ISS and Glass-Lewis is. We use this one insane example where, Ira, Aaron Prize, didn't get the recommendation from ISS and Glass-Lewis because he didn't meet the gender requirements, but then Kathleen also didn't.

It doesn't It makes sense.

The board vote is on the sixth.

She was an African-American woman. They recommended against her, but then also recommended against our enterprise on the grounds he was insufficiently diverse. So I'm like, these things don't make any sense.

Yeah.

So I do think we've got a fundamental issue with corporate governance in publicly traded companies, where you've got about half of the stock market is controlled by passive index funds, and most of them outsource their decision to advisory firms, and particularly, Glass Lewis and ISS. I call them Corporate ISS. So all they do is Basically, they're just terrorists. And they own no stock in any of these companies. I think that there's a fundamental breakdown of fiduciary responsibility here, where where really any company that's managing, even though they're passively managing index funds or whatever, that they do, at the end of the day, have a fiduciary duty to vote along the lines of what would maximize the shareholder returns because people are counting on them. People have all their savings in, say, 401k or something like that, and they're counting on the index funds to do company votes in the direction that would ensure that their retirement savings do as well as possible. But the problem is, if that is then outsourced to ISS and Glass Lewis, which have been infiltrated by far-left activists, because you know where basically political activists go? They go where the power is.

And so effectively, Glass Lewis and ISS control the vote of half the stock market. Now, if you're a political activist, you know what a great place would be to go work? Iss and Glass Lewis, and they do. So my concern for the future, because the Tesla thing is called compensation, but really, it's not about compensation. It's not like I'm going to go out and buy a yacht with it or something. It's just that if I'm going to build up Optimus and have all these robots out there, I need to make sure we do not have a terminated scenario and that I can maximize the safety of the robots. But I feel like I need to have something like a 25% vote, which is enough of a vote to have a strong influence, but not so much of a vote that I can't be fired if I go insane. But my concern would be creating this army of robots and then being fired for political reasons because of ISS and Glass Lewis declined to... Iss and Glass Lewis fire me effectively, or the activists at those bones fire me, even though I've done everything right. That's my concern.

Then I cannot ensure the safety of the robots.

If you don't get that vote, it doesn't go your way. It looks like it's going to. Would you leave? I mean, is that even in the cards? I heard the board was very concerned about that.

Let's just say I'm not going to build a robot on me if I can be easily kicked out by activist investors. No way. No way.

Yeah, makes sense. Who is capable of running the four or five major product lines at Tesla. I mean, this is the madness of it. It's a very complex business. People don't understand what's under the hood there. It's not just a car company. You got batteries, you got trucks, you got the self-driving group. And this is It's a very complex business that you've built over decades now. It's not a very simple thing to run. I don't think there's an Elon equivalent out there who can just jump into the cockpit.

By the way, if we take a full turn around Corporate Governance Corner, also this week, what was interesting about the OpenAI restructuring was I read the letter and your lawsuit was excluded from the allowances of the California attorney general basically saying this thing can go through, which means that your lawsuit is still out there, right? And I think it's going to go to a jury trial.

Yes.

So there, that corporate governance thing is still very much in question. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yes, I believe that we'll go to a jury trial in February or March, and then we'll see what the results are there. But there's a mountain of evidence that shows that OpenAI was created as an open source non nonprofit. It's literally that's the exact description in the incorporation documents. And in fact, the incorporation documents explicitly say that no officer or founding member will benefit financially from OpenAI. And they've completely violated that. And more of it, you can just use the way back machine and look at the website of OpenAI. Again, open source nonprofit, open source nonprofit, the whole way until it looked like, wow, there's a lot of money to be gained here. And then suddenly it starts changing. And they tried to change the definition of OpenAI to mean open to everyone instead of open source, even though it always meant open source. I came up with the name.

Yeah.

That's how I know.

If they open sourced it or they gave you... I mean, you don't need the money, but if they gave you the percentage ownership in it that you would be rightfully, which 50 million for a startup would be half, at least. But they must have made an overture towards you and said, Hey, can we just give you 10% of this thing and give us your blessing? You obviously have a different goal here, yeah?

Yeah. Essentially, since I came up with the idea for the company, named it, provided the A, B, and C rounds of funding, recruited the critical personnel, and told them everything I know, if that If it were in a commercial corporation, I'd probably own half the company. I could have chosen to do that. If it was totally at my discretion, I could have done that. But I created it as a nonprofit for the world, an open-source nonprofit for the world.

Do you think the right thing to do is to take those models and just open-source them today? If you could affect that change, is that the right thing to do?

Yeah, I think that that is what it was created to do, so it should. The best open source models right now, actually, ironically, because Fade seems to be an irony maximizer, the best open source models are generally from China.

Yeah.

That's bizarre. And then I think the second best one is... Or maybe it's better than second best, but the Grok 2. 5 open source model is actually very good. And I think we'd probably be... And we'll continue to open source our models. But whereas, try using the recent so-called OpenAI open source models. They don't work. They basically open sourced a broken, non-working version of their models as a fig leaf. Do you know anyone who's running OpenAI's open source models? Exactly.

Yeah, nobody. We've had a big debate about jobs here. Obviously, there's going to be job displacement. You and I have talked about it for decades. What's your take on the pace of it? Because obviously, you're building self-driving software, you're building Optimus. We're seeing Amazon take some steps here where they're like, Yeah, we're probably not going to hire these positions in the future. Maybe they're getting rid of people now because they were bloated, but maybe some of it's AI. It's all debatable. What do you think timeline is, and what do you think as a society, we're going to need to do to mitigate it if it goes too fast?

I call AI the supersonic tsunami. It's not the most company description in the world. It's fast and big. If there was a tsunami, a giant wall of water moving faster than the speed of sound, that's AI.

When does it land?

Yeah, exactly. Now, this is happening whether I wanted to or not. I actually tried to slow down AI, by the way. And then the reason I The reason I wanted to create OpenAI was to serve as a counterweight to Google, because at the time, Google was essentially at unilateral power in AI, all the AI, essentially. Larry Page was not He was not taking AI's safety seriously. Jason, I'm not sure, were you there when he called me a speciist? Yes, I was there.

You were more concerned about the human race than you were about the machines. You had a clear bias for humanity.

Yes, exactly. I was like, Larry, we need to make sure that the AI doesn't destroy all the humans. And then he called me a speciist, like a racist or something for being pro human intelligence instead of machine intelligence. I'm like, Well, Larry, what side are you on? That's a concern. And then at the time, the Google had essentially a monopoly on AI.

They bought DeepMind, which you were on the board of had an investment in. Larry and Serga had invested in as well.

And it's really interesting. I found out about it because I told them about it. I showed them some stuff from DeepMind, and I think that's how I found out about it and acquired them, actually. I got to give him what I say. But the point is that it's like, look, now he's not taking AI safety seriously, and Google had essentially all the AI and all the computers and all the money. And I'm like, this is a unipolar world where the guy in charge is not taking things seriously, and called me a speciest who being pro-human. What are you doing in those circumstances?

Build a competitor.

Yes. So OpenAI was created essentially as the opposite, which is an open-source nonprofit opposite to Google. Now, unfortunately, it needs to change its name to closed for maximum profit AI. Yeah. For maximum profit, to be clear. The most amount of profit you could possibly get. I mean... It is so... It is like...

It's comical.

When you hear Sam... There's an irony maximized. You have to say, what is the most the most ironic outcome for a company that was created to do open source nonprofit AI is it's It's super closed source. It's tied in Fort Knox. The OpenAI source is locked up tied in Fort Knox, and they are going for maximum profit. Get the bourbon The Steak Knife.

Yeah, I mean.

They're going for the buffet, and they're just diving headfirst into the profit buffet. I mean, it's this, or at least the Revenue Buffet at least. Profit, we'll see. They're like ravenous wolves for revenue. Revenous Wolf. Revenue buffet.

No, no, it's literally like super villain. It's like Bond villain-level flip. It went from being United Nations to being Specter in James Bondland. When you hear him say, When Sam says it's going to raise 1. 4 trillion to build our data centers.

Yeah, but I think he means it.

Yeah, I mean, I would say audacious, but I wouldn't want to insult the word.

It's just insane. I have a question about this.

How is that possible?

In the earnings call, you said something that was insane. And then I think the math actually nets But you said we could connect all the Teslas and allow them in downtime to actually offer up inference, and you can string them all together. I think the math is it could actually be like 100 gigawatts.

Is that right? If ultimately there's a Tesla fleet that is 100 million vehicles, which I think we probably will get to at some point, 100 million vehicle fleet, and they have mostly state-of-the-art inference computers in them that each, say, kilowatt inference computer, and they have built-in power and cooling and connect to the WiFi.

That's the key. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. The I think you'd have 100 gigawatts of inference to compute.

Elon, do you think that the architecture, there was an attention-free model that came out the last week? There's been all of these papers, all of these new models that have been shown to reduce power per token of output by many, many, many orders of magnitude, not just an order of magnitude, but maybe three or four. What's your view and all the work you've been doing on where we're headed in terms of power per unit of computer per token of output?

Well, we have a clear example of power-efficient compute, which is the human brain. Our brains use about 20 watts of power, and all that, only about 10 watts is higher brain function. Half of it is just housekeeping functions, keeping your heart going and breathing and that thing. You got maybe 10 watts of higher brain function in a human. We've managed to build civilization with 10 watts of a biological computer. And that biological computer has a 20-year boot sequence. It's pretty fun. But it's Very power-efficient. So given that humans are capable of inventing general relativity and quantum mechanics, or discovering general... Like inventing aircraft, lasers, the Internet, and discovering physics with a 10-watt MEAT computer, essentially, then there's clearly a massive opportunity for improving the efficiency frequency of AI compute. It's currently many orders of magnitude away from that. And it's still the case that a 100 megawatt or even a gigawatt AI supercomputer at this point can't do everything that a human can do. It will be able to, but it can't yet. Like I said, we've got this obvious case of human brains being very power-efficient and achieving and building civilization with 10 watts to compute.

Our bandwidth is very low. So the speed at which we communicate information to each other is extremely low. We're not communicating at a terabit. We're communicating more at 10 bits per second. Do you think that there's a-That's actually the interesting Conclusion that there's massive opportunity for it being more power-efficient with AI. And at Tesla and at XAI, we continue to see massive improvements in inference, computer efficiency.

You think that there's a moment where you would justify stopping all the traditional cars and just going completely all in on cyber cab if you felt like the learning was good enough and the system was safe enough? Is there ever a moment like that, or do you think you'll always dual track and always do both?

I mean, all of the cars we make right now are capable of being a robot taxi. There's a little confusion of the terminology because our cars look normal. Like Model 3 or Model Y, it's a good-looking car, but it looks normal. But it has an advanced AI computer, an advanced AI software, and cameras. We We didn't want the cameras to stick out, so that we didn't want them to be ugly or stick out. So if we put them in an out-obtrustive location. The forward-looking cameras are in front of the rear view mirror. The side view mirrors are in the side repeaters. The side of your camera is on the side of Peter's. The rear camera is just above the license plate, actually, typically where the rear view camera is in a car. And the diagonal forward ones are in the B-pillars. If you look closely, you can see all the cameras, but you have to look closely. We just didn't want them to stick out warts or something. But actually, all the cars we make are hyper-intelligent and have the cameras in the right places. They just look normal. And so all of the cars we make are capable of unzuvised full autonomy.

Now, we have a dedicated product, which is the CyberCab, which has no no steering wheel or pedals, which are obviously prestigial in an autonomous world. We saw a production of the cyber cab in Q2 next year. And we'll scale that up to quite high volume. I think, ultimately, we'll make millions of cyber cabs per year. But it is important to emphasize that all of our cars are capable of being robotic taxis.

The cyber cab is gorgeous. I told you, I'd buy two of those if you put a steering wheel in them, and there is a big movement on- We're not putting a steering wheel in. People are begging for it. Why not? Why not let us buy a couple, just the first ones off the line and drive them? They look great. It's like the perfect model. You always had a vision for a Model 2, right? Isn't it the perfect model, too, in addition to being a cyber cab?

Look, the reality is people may think they want to drive their car, but the reality is that they don't. How many times have you been, say, in an Uber or Lyft and you said, You know what? I wish I could take over from the driver. I wish I could get off my phone and take over from the Uber driver and drive to my destination. How many times have you thought that to yourself?

No, it's quite the opposite.

Zero times, okay.

I have the Model Y, and it just got 14. I have Juniper, and I got the 14 one, and I put it on Mad Max Mode the last couple of days. That is a unique experience.

I was like, Wait a second.

This thing is driving in a very unique fashion. Yeah.

It assumes you want to get to your destination in a hurry.

Yeah. I used to give cam drivers an extra $20 to do that.

Medical appointment or something. I don't know.

Yeah, but It feels like it's getting very close, but you have to be very careful. Uber had a horrible accident with the safety driver. Cruise had a terrible accident. It wasn't their fault exactly, except somebody got hit and then they hit the person a second time and they got dragged. There's this pretty high stake, so you're being extremely cautious.

The car is actually extremely capable right now, but we are being extremely cautious and we're being paranoid about it because to your point, even one accident would be headline news. Well, probably worldwide headline news.

Especially if it's a Tesla. Like, Waymo, I think, gets a bit of a pass. I think there's half the country or a number of people probably would go extra hard on you.

Yes, exactly. Not everyone in the press is my friend. I hadn't noticed. Some of them are a little antagonistic. But people are pressuring you to go fast.

I think everybody's got to just take their time with this thing. It's obviously going to happen, but I just get very nervous that the pressure to put these things on the road faster than they're ready is just a little crazy. I applaud you for putting the safety monitor in, doing the safety driver. No shame in the safety driver game. It's so much the right decision, obviously, but people are criticizing you for it. I think it's dumb. It's the right thing to do.

Yes, and we do expect it to not have any safety occupant or... There's not really a driver that just sits- Monitor? Safety monitor. They just sit in the car and don't do anything.

Safety dude.

Yeah. But we do expect that the cars will be driving around without any safety monitor before the end of the year, so sometime in December.

In Austin, yeah. I mean, you got a number of reps under your belt in Austin, and it feels like pretty well... You guys have done a great job figuring out where the trouble spots are. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you learned in the first, I don't know, it's been three or four months of this so far. What did you learn in the first three or four months of the Austin experiment?

It's gone pretty smoothly. A lot of things that we're learning are just how to manage a fleet. Because you've got to write all the fleet management software, right? Yeah. You've got to write the ride-hailing software. Basically, the software that Uber has, you've got to write that software. It's just summing a robot car instead of a car with a driver. A lot One of the things we're doing, we're scaling up the number of cars to say, what happens if you have a thousand cars? We think probably we'll have a thousand cars or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year, probably I don't know, 500 or more in the Greater Austin area. You have to make sure the cars don't all, for example, go to the same supercharger at the same time, or don't all go to the same intersection. It's like, what do these cars do? And then sometimes there's high demand, and sometimes there's low demand. What do you do during those times? Do you have the car circled the block? Do you have to try to find a parking space? Sometimes, like I said, it's a disabled parking space or something, but the writing's faded or the thing's faded.

The car is like, Oh, look, a parking space. It'll jump right in there.

Yeah, get a ticket.

Got to look carefully, make sure it's not an illegal parking space, or it sees a space or it sees a space to park, and it's ridiculously tight. But it's like, I can get in there. But with three inches on either side type. Bad computer. Yeah, that's true. But nobody else will be able to in the car if you do that. There's just all these oddball corner cases.

And regulators. Regulators are all very Yeah, they have different levels of perspicuityness and regulations depending on the city, depending on the airport. It's just very different everywhere. That's going to just be a lot of blocking and tackling, and it just takes time.

Elon, let me ask you another-In order to take people to San Jose Airport, you actually have to connect to San Jose Airport servers because you have to pay a fee every time you go off.

So the car actually has to do a remote call The robot car has to do a remote procedure call to San Jose Airport servers to say I'm dropping someone off at the airport and charge me whatever, five bucks. There are all these quirky things like that. Airports are somewhat of a racket.

Yeah.

So we have to solve that thing. But it's funny that the robot car is calling the airport server to charge his credit card or whatever.

To send a fax. Yeah, we're going to be dropping off at this time.

But it will seem to come extremely normal to see cars going around with no one in them.

Yeah.

Extremely Just before we lose you, I want to ask if you saw the Bill Gates memo that he put out? A lot of people are talking about this memo.

I just want to say, Billy G is not my love.

Oh, man.

Did climate change become woke? Did it become woke? And is it over being woke? What happened? And what What happened with Billy G?

I mean, you know.

Great question.

You think that someone like Bill Gates, who clearly started a technology company that's one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, you think he'd be really quite strong in the sciences. But actually, my at least Direct conversations with him. He is not strong in the sciences. Yeah, this is really surprising. He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigabactory in Austin and was telling me that it's impossible to have a long-range semi-truck. And I was like, Well, but we literally have them and you can drive them. And Pepsi is literally using them right now, and you can drive them yourself or send someone. Obviously, Bob gets to drive it himself. But you could send a trusted person to drive the truck and verify that it can do the things that we say it's doing. And it's like, No, it doesn't work. I'm like, Okay, I'm stuck there. Then I was like, Well, so it must be that you disagree with the what hours per kilogram of the battery pack so that you must think that perhaps we can't achieve the energy density of the battery pack, or that the what hours per mile of the truck is too high, and that when you combine those two numbers, the range is low.

And so which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong? And what numbers do you think are correct? And he didn't know any of the numbers. And I'm like, Well, then doesn't it seem that it's perhaps premature to conclude that a long-range semi cannot work if you do not know the energy density of the battery pack or the energy efficiency of the truck chassis?

But yeah, he's now taken a 180 on climate. He's saying maybe this shouldn't be the top priority.

I'm just going to say, Climate is gay. Why would he say climate is gay? That's wrong.

It's totally retarded.

Why would Bill Gates say that climate is gay and retarded? Come on. Maybe he's got some data centers he's got to put Does he have to stand up a data center for Sam Altman or something?

I don't know. What is Azure? I don't know. He changed his position. I can't figure out why.

The reality of the whole climate change thing is that you've just had people who say it doesn't exist at all, and then people who say it's our super-lamas and saying, RARS is going to be underwater in five And obviously, neither of those two positions are true. The reality is you can measure the carbon concentration of the atmosphere. Again, you could just literally buy a CO₂ monitor from Amazon, it's like 50 bucks, and you can measure it yourself. And you can say, Okay, look, the parts per million of CO₂ in the atmosphere has been increasing steadily at 2-3 per year. At some point, If you continue to take billions, especially trillions of tons of carbon from deep underground and transfer it to the atmosphere and oceans, so you transfer it from deep underground into the surface cycle, you will change the chemical constitution frequency of the atmosphere and oceans. You just literally will. Then you can only argue to what degree and over what time scale. The reality is that, in my opinion, is that we've got at least 50 before it's a serious issue. I don't think we've got 500 years, but we've probably got 50.

It's not five years. If you're trying to get to the right order of magnitude of accuracy, I'd say the concern level for climate change is on the order of 50 years. It's definitely not five, and I think it probably isn't 500. Really, the right course of action is actually just the reasonable course of action, which is to lean in the direction of sustainable energy. And lean in the direction of a solar battery future, and generally have the rules of the system lean in that direction. I don't think we need massive subsidies, but then we also shouldn't have massive subsidies for the oil and gas industry. So the oil and gas industry has massive tax write offs They don't even think of as subsidies because these things have been in place for, in some cases, 80 years. But they're not there for other industries. So when you've got special tax conditions that are in one industry and not in another industry, I call that a subsidy, obviously, it is. But they've taken it for granted for so long in oil and gas that they don't think of it as a subsidy. The right course of action, of course, is to remove, in my opinion, to remove subsidies from oil industries.

But the political The reality is that the oil and gas industry is very strong in the Republican Party, but not in the Democratic Party. You will not see, obviously, even the tiniest subsidy being removed from the oil, gas, and coal industry. In fact, there were some that were added to the oil, gas, and coal industry in the Big Bill. There were a massive number of sustainable energy incentives that were removed, some of which I agreed with, by the way. Some of the incentives have gone too far. But anyway, the correct scientific conclusion, in my opinion, and I think we can back this up with solid reasoning, ask Grok, for example, is that we should lean in the direction of moving towards a sustainable energy future. We will eventually run out of oil, gas, and coal to burn anyway because there's a finite amount of that stuff. We will eventually have to go to something that lasts long time that is sustainable.

But to your point about the irony of things, it seems to be the case that making energy with solar is cheaper than making energy with some of these carbon-based sources today. The irony is it's already working. I mean, the market is moving in that direction and this notion that we need to force everyone into a model of behavior, it's just naturally going to change because we've got better systems. You and others have engineered better systems that make these alternatives cheaper, and therefore, they're winning. They're actually winning in the market, which is great. But they can't win if there are subsidies to support the old systems, obviously.

Yeah. I mean, by the way, there are actually massive disincentives of Postfolo because China is a massive producer of solar panels. China does an incredible job of of solar panel manufacturing. Really incredible. They have roughly one and a half terawatts of solar production right now, and they're only using a terawatt per year. But by the way, that's a gigantic number. The average US power consumption is only half a terawatt. So just think about that for a second. China's solar panel production max capacity is one and a half terawatts per year. Us steady-state power usage is half a terawatt. Now, you do have to produce one and a half terawatts a year of solar. You need to add that with batteries, taking into account the difference between night and day, the fact that the solar panel is not always pointed directly at the sun, that thing. So you can divide by five-ish to say that... But that still means that China has the ability to produce solar panels that have a steady-state output that is roughly two-thirds that of the entire US economy from all sources, which means that just with solar alone, China can, in 18 months, produce enough solar panels to power the entire United States, all the electricity of the United States.

What do you think about near-field solar, a. K. A. Nuclear?

I'm in favor of... Look, make energy from any way you want. That doesn't, obviously, harmful to the environment. Generally, people don't welcome a nuclear reactor in their backyard. They're not like, championing.

Put it here. Put it under my bed.

They're like, he put it.

Put it on my roof.

If your next door neighbor said, Hey, I'm selling my house and they're putting a reactor there, what would you... The typical homeowner response would be negative. Very few people will embrace nuclear reactor adjacent to their house. But nonetheless, I do think nuclear is actually very safe. There's a lot of scaremongering and propaganda around fission, if you talk about fission. But fission is actually very safe. They obviously have this on the Navy. Us Navy, has this on submarines and aircraft carriers and with people really walking right... I mean, a submarine is a pretty crowded place, and they have a nuclear-powered submarine. I think vision is fine as an option. The regulatory environment makes it very difficult to actually get that done. Then it is important to appreciate just the sheer magnitude of the power of the sun. Here are some just important basic facts. Even Wikipedia has these facts right. In So you don't even have to. You don't have to use Rockpedia. But even Wikipedia has it. Yeah, even Wikipedia got it, right? Yes. What I'm saying, even Wikipedia has got these facts, right? The sun is about 99. 8% of the mass of the Solar System, then Jupiter is about 0.

1%, and everything else is in the remaining 0. 1%, and we are much less than 0. 1%. So if If you burnt all of the mass of the Solar System, then the total energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. If you just burnt Earth, the whole planet, and burn to Jupiter, which is very big and quite challenging to burn. If you turned Jupiter into a thermonuclear actor, it wouldn't matter compared to the sun. The compared to the sun, the sun is 99. 8% of the mass of the solar system, and everything else is in the mostlynius category. Basically, no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system rounds up to 100% from the sun. You could even throw another Jupiter in there. We're going to snag a Jupiter from somewhere else, and somehow I'll transport. You could transport two more Jupiter into our Solar System, burn them, and the sun would still round up to 100%. As long as you're at 99. 6%, you're still rounding up to 100%. Maybe that gives some perspective of why solar is really the thing that matters. As soon as you start thinking about things at a grander scale, like Khodushiv Scale 2 civilizations, it becomes very, very obvious.

I'm not saying anything that's new, by the way. Anyone who studies physics has known this for a very long time. In fact, Khodushiv, I think, was a Russian physicist who came up with this idea, I think in the '60s, just as a way to classify civilizations, where Kładischeev scale one would be you've harnessed most of the energy of the planet. Kładischeev scale two, you've harnessed most of the energy of your sun. Kładischeev three, you've harnessed most of the energy of your galaxy. Now, we're only about, I don't know, a few % of Khodushev Scale 1 right now, optimistically. But as soon as you go to Khodushev Scale 2, where you're talking about the power of the sun, then you're really just saying everything is solar power, and the rest is in the noise. Yeah, so Like the Sun produces about a billion times, call it well over a billion times more energy than everything on Earth combined.

It's crazy. It's mind-blowing.

Right. Yeah.

Solar is the obvious solution to all this. Yeah, I mean, short term, we have to use some of these other sources, but hey, there it is. An hour and a half with the Elon Musk.

Can you think of a star power? Like, maybe we got a branding issue here. Yeah, star power. Instead of solo power, it's starlight.

Yeah, starlight.

It's the power of a blazing sun. How much energy does an entire star have? Yeah. More than enough.

More than enough. All right.

That's for sure. Also, you really need to keep the power local. So Most people, honestly, I've had these discussions so many times. It's where they say, Would you beam the power back to Earth? I'm like, Do you want to melt Earth? Because you would melt Earth if you did that. We'd be vaporized in an instant. So you really need to get the power local, basically distributed power. And I guess most would be used for intelligence. So it's like the future is a whole bunch of solar-powered AI satellites.

The only thing that makes the star work is it just happens to have a lot of mass, so it has that gravity to ignite the fusion, to ignite the fusion reaction. But we could ignite the fusion reaction on Earth now. I don't know if your view has changed. I think we talked about this a couple of years ago where you were pretty like, we don't know if or when fusion becomes real here, but theoretically, we could take 10.

I want to be careful. My opinion on... I started physics in college. At one point in high school, I was thinking about a career in physics. One of my sons actually is doing a career in physics. But the problem is I came to the conclusion that I'd be waiting for a collateral or a telescope. I don't have enough to get that collateral to a career in physics, but I have a strong interest in the subject. My opinion on, say, creating a fusion reactor on Earth is I think this is actually not a hard problem, actually. It's a little hard. I mean, It's not totally trivial, but if you just scale up a talkamark, the bigger you make it, the easier the problem gets. You've got a surface volume ratio thing where you're trying to maintain a really hard core core while having a wall that doesn't melt. So that's a similar problem with rocket engines. You've got a super hot core in the rocket engine, but you don't want the chamber walls of the rocket engine to melt. So you have temperature gradient where it's very hot in the middle, and it gradually gets cold enough as you get to the perimeter, as you get to the chamber walls in the rocket engine, where it doesn't melt.

Because if you've lowered the temperature, and you got a temperature gradient. So if you just scale up the donut reactor, talkamark, and improve your surface volume ratio, it becomes much easier. You can absolutely, in my opinion, I think just anyone who looks at the math, you can make a reactor that generates more energy than it consumes. And the bigger you make it, the easier it is. In the limit, you just have a giant gravitationally contained thermonuclide reactor like the sun, which requires no maintenance, and it's free. This is also why Why would we bother doing that on making a little itty-bitty sun that's so microscopic you'd barely notice on Earth when we've got the giant free one in the sky?

Yeah, but we only get a fraction of 1% of that energy on the planet Earth. We have to go- Much less than 1%. Yeah. Right. So we've got to figure out how to wrap the sun if we're going to harness that energy. That's our long term.

If people want to have fun with reactors, that's fine. Have fun with reactors. But it's not a serious endeavor compared to the sun. It's a fun science project to make a nuclear reactor, but it's just peanuts compared to the sun. And even the solar energy that does reach Earth is a gigawatt per square kilometer, or roughly called two and a half gigawatts per square mile. So that's a lot. And the commercially available panels are around 25, almost 26 % efficiency. And then you say, if you pack it densely, you get an 80 % packing density, you're going to which I think in a lot of places, you could get an 80 % packing density. You effectively have about 200 megawatts per square kilometer. And you need to pair that with batteries so you have continuous power, although our power usage drops considerably at night, so you need less batteries than you think. And doesn't the question then become- A rough way to... Maybe an easy number to remember is a gigawatt hour per square kilometer per day is a roughly correct number.

But then doesn't your technical challenge become the scalability of manufacturing of those systems? So accessing the raw materials and getting them out of the of planet Earth to make them, to make enough of them, to get to that scale on that volume that you're talking about. And as you think about what it would take to get to that scale, do we have an ability to do that with what we have today? Can we pull that much material out of the ground?

Yes. Solar panels are made of silicon, which is sand, essentially.

I guess more on the battery side.

The battery side, yeah. So on the battery side, the iron, phosphate, lithium, battery, battery, cells. Earth. I'd like to throw out some interesting factoids here. Most people don't know, if you said, as measured by mass, what is the biggest element? What is the made of as measured by mass. Actually, it's iron.

Iron? Yeah.

Yeah, we're, I think, 32% iron, 30% oxygen, and then everything else is in the remaining percentage. We're basically a rusty ball bearing. That's Earth. With a lot of silicon at the surface in the form of sand. The iron phosphate, iron phosphate lithiumine cells, Iron, extremely common, most common element on Earth, even in the Crest. Then phosphorus is also very common. And then the Anode is carbon, but also very common. And then lithium is also very common. Actually, you can do the math. In fact, we did the math and published the math, but then we looked at it. It's on the Tesla website that shows that you can completely power Earth with solar panels and batteries, and there's no shortage of anything.

All right.

So on that note- On that note.

Yeah, go get to work, Elon, and just power the Earth while you're getting implants into people's brains and satellites and other good fun stuff. Good to see you, buddy.

Yeah, good to see you guys.

Yeah. Yeah. Stop by any time.

Thanks for doing this.

You got the Zoom link.

Stop by any time. Thank you for coming today, and thank you for liberating free speech three years ago.

You're welcome.

Yeah. That was a very important milestone.

I see all you guys are in just different places. I guess this is a very virtual situation. Always been that.

I'm at the Ranch.

Are you ever in the same room?

We try not to be.

Only when we do that summit, but otherwise, we avoid each other. We do the summit in the same day. Yeah.

Otherwise-your summit is pretty fun. We had a great time accounting SNL sketches that didn't make it.

Oh, God, there's just so many good ones. I mean, we didn't even get to the Jeopardy ones.

Yeah.

No, the Crock. No, the Crock.

No, the Crock.

No, the Crock. Oh, wait. I think we skipped a few that would have dramatically increased our probability of being killed. We can take this one out.

Boys, II love you. I love you. I love you all. I'm going to poker. Later. Take care. All right.

All right. Thanks.

See you later. Bye-bye.

Love you. We'll let your winners ride.

Rainman David Sack.

And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Westies. I'm the queen of Kinawa. I'm going all in.

I'm going all in.

I'm going all in. I'm going all in.

Besties are gone.

That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Oh, man.

My architecture will meet me as well as... We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.

What? You're the bee.

What you're the bee.

We need to get merches.

I'm doing all in. What? I'm doing all in.